“Dear Joe,
This is probably not the correct place for a death metal band, but I just love to be irrational from time to time…”
So began the email from Bram, the guitarist from Skeletor, a Dutch death metal band. The Dutch speak simply wonderful English.
Happily for all of us, Bram couldn’t be more wrong. It’s true that Skeletor is the first death metal band to appear on ANBAD since the entertainingly disgusting Coprophagia a couple of years ago, but that doesn’t mean that ANBAD is death-metal-phobic.
It’s just that death metal is the kind of thing that most people only listen to every few years. When you do choose to listen though, remember to ensure that Skeletor are your go-to death metal band.
There is so much that I love about death metal, that I don’t really know where to start. Part of it is the sub-genre itself: ‘metal just isn’t gloomy enough’, someone must have thought, ‘I’m going to introduce mortality into the equation.’ This is the same reasoning that brought us Epic Doom Metal, by the way – an altogether more ridiculous brand of noise.
Simply put though, death metal sounds like a whole ton of fun: alternately howling and chugga-chugga guitars, pulverising drumming, and vocals that sound as if sung by the results of a human-wolf gene-splicing experiment gone wrong.
Skeletor might not make music that you’d admit to liking, or have even considered liking, but they are as entertaining as hell. Prove yourself wrong.